I'm a history buff, but there's an awful lot of history out there, and absolutely no one knows all of it. Not only are the historians constantly learning new stuff, but there are a lot of things people just don't bring up that often, so regular schmucks like me don't pick up on it unless we are actually searching something out.
So, I appreciate Ammoland's Dean Weingarten teaching me a little something about FDR's time.
My school textbooks were all about the Great Depression and World War II when talking about that particular Roosevelt. It didn't get very far into the weeds on much else, and a lot of what they said about him during the Depression was flat-out wrong.
Still, he was in office a long time, so there was going to be some stuff missed. For example, let's talk about one of his attorneys general, because this SOB was determined to push gun registration hard...for some guns, anyway.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1933 pick for Attorney General was Senator Thomas J. Walsh, born in 1859 in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Two Rivers had a population of 1,337 in 1860. A self-made man, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He grew up in the West. Walsh won the election to the US Senate from Montana in 1912. He exposed the Teapot Dome scandal in 1922. His summer home was in what became Glacier National Park. On the way to his inauguration in 1933, he died of an apparent heart attack on a passenger train, as he traveled to D.C. from Florida, at the age of 73.
Homer Stillé Cummings was meant as a stopgap replacement.
Homer Stillé Cummings was a reliable political hack whom Roosevelt originally appointed as Governor General of the Philippines. After Walsh’s untimely death, Roosevelt selected Cummings as Attorney General.
Cummings was an early child of the American Urban class, born in Chicago in 1870. He grew up and prospered in the American Northeast. In 1933, he was a member of the Democratic National Committee and had previously served as its chairman. He left the office of Attorney General in 1939 and entered private law practice in Washington, D.C.
Homer Cummings became Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Attorney General in 1933. He became the crusader who pushed hard for de facto national firearms bans and especially for handgun registration in the United States.
Cummings succeeded in passing the National Firearms Act but failed to obtain national handgun registration. In 1937, he stated his belief that all firearms must be registered.
“I am convinced of this—any practical measure for the control of firearms must at least contain provisions for the registration of all firearms.”
In an interview with Homer Stillé Cummings in 1938, much of his philosophy about gun control was revealed. Rex Collier was on the staff of the Washington Evening Star, which was the paper of record in Washington, D.C., until 1981. Cummings had pushed for national handgun registration and licensing in the National Firearms Act. At first, he did not include short barrel rifles, but was willing to do so when pressured by Minnesota Representative Harold Knutson.
The reason short-barreled long guns were included was that it was believed those would be used as a workaround for handguns. When handguns were removed from the bill before passage, no one bothered to do anything about SBRs or shotguns.
Cummings is a name I was unfamiliar with before reading this, but allow me to say that while I know nothing else about the man, I despise his legacy.
The push against handguns continued for decades, finally being put aside after the gun control crowd realized that people weren't going to play that game. Instead, they switched to things more easily demonized, like so-called assault weapons.
But the truth is that the urban elites don't like guns, don't want you to have them, and they damn sure don't like the idea of not knowing who has what. Why, though? What good does registration do?
We know that the National Firearms Act was passed, but the mob didn't give up their machine guns. Gang-bangers in the 90s used them to spray down entire city blocks with bullets, all to kill one rival, and cared nothing for collateral damage. Today, these same people are buying devices to turn their semi-auto striker-fired handguns into machine pistols.
All of this despite machine guns being registered. It's done nothing to curb the proliferation of full-auto firearms in criminal hands.
But what it does, though, is make it really handy if someone wants to round up a particular type of firearm from the citizens of this nation.
Every lawful machine gun owner knows good and well that the feds know what they've got. They might not know everything, but it's usually a safe bet that someone with a machine gun probably has more than one firearm. They've opted to put themselves in that position, but they shouldn't have been forced to make that decision.
And people like Cummings wanted that for even more of us.
Couple that with the Canadian mandates on handguns, where they can only exist in people's homes at the moment, and it's clear that there's nothing new under the sun, and Cummings' ideas will come back into vogue among the anti-gun set.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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